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Monday, 6 May 2013

Wish you were here!" - how a postcard can help attract the best talent

In 2004, in Silicon Valley, Google posted a huge billboard ad featuring a
mathematical problem. The answer led to a web address with yet another
puzzle to crack. People who successfully followed this intellectual
treasure hunt ended up being invited in for a job interview.

This is an extreme example of a recruitment principle spelled out in a
new article by psychologists in Belgium. They say that distinctive
recruitment procedures are the secret to attracting more and better job
applicants, especially in fields like engineering where competition for
the best talent is intense.

Working with a Belgian technology company, Saartje Cromheecke
and her colleagues sent out a real job opportunity to 1,997 potential
applicants, around half of them via email (as is the industry standard),
and half via a hand-written postcard depicting a coffee mug and a blank
daily agenda. The email and postcard message featured the same layout
and included the same written information and content about the job
vacancy.

Sixty-two of the contacted engineers applied for the job - 82% of them
had received the postcard, just 18% had received the email. Stated
differently, only 1% of the engineers who were emailed actually applied
for the job compared with 5% of those who received a postcard. This
latter figure represents a high response rate for the field. Moreover,
the respondents to the postcard tended to be better educated, consistent
with the researchers' prediction that a recruitment message sent via a
"strange" medium will be more likely to grab the attention of
better-qualified personnel who aren't actively looking for new
opportunities.

The researchers said that social cognition research has shown how we
adopt mental "scripts" for different aspects of our lives. "...
recruiting in a strange way that differs from what competitors are doing
is likely to be inconsistent with recruitment scripts," they said,
"enhancing potential applicants' attention, attraction, and intention to
apply."

It's important to note, Cromheecke's team aren't saying that postcards
will always be the answer. Rather, "this field experiment puts forth
'media strangeness' as a more general evidence-based principle, which
recruiters might take into account when selecting media for
communicating job postings."